Amazon Web Services (AWS) first introduced customers to its AWS Well-Architected Framework in 2020 in the form of a whitepaper designed to help cloud architects build secure, high-performing, resilient and efficient infrastructure for their applications and workloads. As my colleague Ty Annen outlined in his Annual Performance Review blog post back in June, The AWS Well-Architected Framework is divided into five pillars of architectural best practices:
- Operational Excellence
- Security
- Reliability
- Performance Efficiency
- Cost Optimization
The AWS Well-Architected Framework has rapidly expanded to include domain-specific lenses, hands-on labs, and the AWS Well-Architected Tool, all of which provide a consistent approach for AWS cloud users to evaluate architectures and implement designs that can scale over time.
Once a Well-Architected Framework has been established, AWS encourages customers to keep their cloud environments finely tuned by regularly evaluating their AWS workloads, identifying high risk issues and making and recording their necessary improvements. It provides a way for you to consistently measure your architectures against best practices and identify areas for improvement.
How it Works
The AWS Well-Architected Framework Review, often called the “AWS WAFR,” was developed to help IT professionals, operations staff and anyone with a cost interest to evaluate the workload and implement improvements for future workloads. AWS advises customers to complete the Framework Review quarterly.
As an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner and member of the AWS Well-Architected Partner Program, Lightstream has deep AWS knowledge and is certified to deliver an AWS Well-Architected Review that includes strategies to help you compare your workloads against best practices and obtain guidance to produce stable and efficient systems.
Prior to your Well-Architected Review, Lightstream can help you identify a priority workload to evaluate. Then together we’ll take a deep dive into that critical workload and provide recommendations as well as a roadmap to making the recommended modifications. Once you implement the modifications, you will receive credit funding from AWS to cover the cost of the review and remediation.
It’s not uncommon for overworked and understaffed business leaders and IT professionals to put off performing Well-Architected Reviews. They think, everything is running smoothly so why try to fix something that isn’t broken? But the truth is, no matter how well your environment seems to be performing or how much you’ve managed to improve processes and increase your organization’s efficiency, you have the opportunity to do it even better.
The bottom line is this: you have a duty to correct misconfigurations and proactively avert security threats and financial and operational inefficiencies. And between new instances, changing security groups, and updated service offerings, you must make sure that your organization is maximizing every opportunity for savings and automation. The longer you put off your AWS Well-Architected Reviews, the greater your organization’s vulnerability is to cybersecurity attacks and getting bypassed by your competition.
Contact Lightstream to find out how Well-Architected Framework Reviews can optimize and update your AWS cloud environment, ultimately helping your organization to cut costs, increase revenue, ensure compliance, go to market faster and increase the quality of your products and services.
